1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a system and method that controls comments in a collaborative document. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method that presents comments in a document to selected individuals as well as securing comments when needed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Documents (e.g., word processing documents) are an important form of communication and documentation. Because of their importance, the audience for a particular document may include many types of individuals. For example, a document may have more than one author and more than one reviewer. Each of these authors and reviews may have a different level of importance and scope regarding the document, and therefore some may be responsible for authoring or reviewing the entire document while others are concerned with particular sections. In addition, some individuals reviewing the document may be supervisors over other individuals that are authoring or reviewing the document. Because of the varied types of individuals authoring and reviewing a document, comments of a sensitive or confidential nature are often left out of traditional comments since such comments are visible to all users of the document.
One approach to providing comments only to selected individuals is to send the comments via another media, such as in a separate email note. The obvious challenge of this approach is that the comments included in a separate email note are disconnected from the actual document making it difficult to determine where the comment applies. Another challenge of this approach is that the email-based comment does not run with the lifecycle of the document, so authors and reviews have a more difficult time assessing whether the comment was adequately addressed in further drafts.